Pop acoustic song under construction, need mixing advice

TimN said:
Hey Brian,
I just listened to your tune above--really nice! well recorded, and well mixed. It sounds very good on my monitors, I must say. What are you using to monitor with? How is signal going in? Prabhu, if you're reading, how one listens and records is the biggest thing--the room you're mixing in is what determines if you're hearing things right or not.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your kind remarks. My system is largely Presonus top to bottom. I monitor on Presonus Eris 8, everything running through Presonus Audiobox 44VSL audio interface, and using Presonus Studio One Professional DAW and mastering suite. I use SONY MDR-7506 headphones for critical listening mixing.

The listening environment (for Prahbu and anyone else) makes a huge difference to mixing, which is why I would say: even though mixing on headphones is a sin, if you have to choose between mixing on headphones and monitoring in a terrible acoustic environment, I'd choose headphones every time. Fortunately right now I have a decent listening environment, even though I have zero proper acoustic treatment.

Two reasons I love the Eris 8 monitors: 1) They are 8" in a *very* affordable home studio price, which means you get all the bass response you usually don't get from typical 5" home studio monitors; 2) They have active EQ built in, including -2 & -4db bass frequency selector. In my case, my monitors sit only 1 ft off of a wall, so I have the -2db switch engaged to compensate for increased bass from the listening environment. The result is excellent for my situation.

I've attached a photo of my desk.

Music Studio.jpg
 
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Hey Everyone,
Brian that's an amazing setup man! (dream setup!)
Yes a lot of parts in the song are off, like the shakers for example, have to rerecord them.
Tim i'm monitoring JUSt with headphones ;P. The room im in is okay, a reasonably quite place. And yes iv started reading up on more before i ask here, i'm blindly applying my plugins in the mix.
Also I'm in the middle of transitioning from recording/mixing on my intel core2Duo laptop ;P to an i7 desktop, hope things get better now.
Thanks.
 
Update

Hey everyone,
Attaching an update of the song so far.
I just realized iv been asking the dumbest questions, have been reading up more now. There's so much!
Thanks.
 

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Very interesting song, but to be truthful.. Not very cohesive. The compressor is pumping like crazy through the whole song. If the track is recorded with the pumping, then.... not quite sure what to do about it. But if it's not, then get rid of it, and start from scratch.

It sounds like it wants to be a beautiful song, but really, all I hear is that compressor pumping.

*EDIT* - forget everything I just said.. I listened to the first one.

Listening to the latest one, and it sounds 100% better. No compressor sound. Sounds much more cohesive. A bit much room in my opinion, but that's just my taste. Yeah... This one is *much* better. The progress is impressive.

If I had a critique now, it'd be the vocals.. they are full of low-mid's, and it's a bit muddy. reduce it with EQ, and the vocals will pop more (and sound better).
 
Whoa! This sounds much, much better. Now for some specific critiques:

-Lead vocals can have some low mids taken out, or alternatively you bring bring up a high pass filter to somewhere between 150 and 180hz
-The lead vox fade away around 1:10, what happened there?
-I don't love the way the drums have been treated. They feel very distant, particularly the snare drum, while the overheads feel up close. Work on the balance between the various drum elements and maybe back off the snare verb.
-Pretty serious lack of low end in the entire mix. I'm a big fan of full low end even though it seems to have become industry standard to push the bass down in favor of the loudness war. You'll be amazed at how much bigger your song sounds with a full low end.

Great work though man, it's well on its way!
 
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